Monday, September 3, 2012

Time for a massive computer upgrade. I
did an upgrade early last summer to an AMD 1090T, at the time it was
one step down from AMD's highest offering but still largely out
performed by Intels moderate offerings. At that time my focus was
for gaming and it worked really well except for in The Old Republic.

Now I decided to go with Intel. The
word on the street is Intel's Ivy Bridge. Yeah it is great from all
the benchmarks I have seen. It's price point isn't out of this world
either but the current offerings do not have a couple things I am
looking for. (6 core/12 thread or insane amounts of ram). I
considered some Xeon options briefly, but I found them limiting. The
spot in between for me was Sandy Bridge-E.

The Intel i7-3930k at $570 is a little
pricey considering many Ivy Bridge processors perform just about as
well (if not better) per core, but they are limited to 4 cores giving
the i7-3930k a bonus to applications like Adobe After Effects and
other applications that can take advantage of the extra cores. The
i7-3960x at around $1,100 is just to darn expensive for the moderate
speed increase.

The motherboard that this will run on
is the Asus Rampage IV Extreme. $470 is a nice chunk of change to
put into a motherboard but it has nearly everything you could want in
a motherboard. Lots of USB3 and USB2, lots of SATA II/III
connections, RAID, Quad SLI PCIE 3.0, 8 DIMM Slots for 64GB of ram..
and much more. Despite my problems with Asus I went with it anyway.

You cannot have a system with out RAM
and I got some, 64GB or G.Skill Ripjaws Z Series PC 1600. 32GB would
have been more than enough at $170, but at the price doubling it up
for $340 for the option of a nice sized RAM Cache or Disk.

For Storage, well really just
applications I plan to run, storage is handled by a NAS (below), I
picked two Solid State Drives. The first drive is a 256GB Samsung
830 for windows and what ever programs I choose to run. The second
drive is a ADATA XPG 128GB that will be used primarily for temp
files (like adobe cache). The two together cost around $300, I
caught a sale. I considered RAID 0 but unless you meet specific
requirements RAID and SSDs lack some important features (like TRIM).
New drivers for the Intel controllers are said to fix this and I may
upgrade at some point once the bugs are ironed out.

The i7's do not come with a stock
cooler like the average CPU. It seems silly at that price point. I
had to pick up a cooler. Decent air cooling runs between $30-$70. I
figured I would go ahead and try Liquid cooling. I picked up a
Corsair H60 closed loop cooler. It should be enough cooling until I
decide to over clock. If I should decide to clock the CPU up I can
get another cooler and put this in my current AMD 1090T setup which
tends to run rather warm.

To power the system I got a Cooler
Master Silent Pro. CM has come a long way in recent years to making
better quality products. At 1000W it is over kill for this setup but
was only a little more than the 850W and gives me the option of going
to Quad SLI some time.

I am recycling my current video card
(Radeon 6870) and DVD-Burner. Currently the 6870 is still holding
its own in the mid-range gaming market and the DVD-Burner will really
only be used to install my OS.

This system will be housed in a Cooler
Master Storm Trooper Case. No I didn’t' buy it because it said
Storm Trooper, It was just bonus. This is a big case with a lot of
great options. It has an X-Dock, USB3, eSATA, fan controller, lots
of drive bays and expansion slots and good cooling options. At $150
it was hard to not buy it.

For OS I decided to make sure
everything was on the Up and Up and purchased Windows 7 Ultimate
Retail for $290. I could have gotten the OEM system builder version
for about a hundred less. With the OEM version though you receive NO
support from Microsoft and if your motherboard dies you are supposed
to have to buy a new OS. (lots of people get around that though). I
figure spend a little extra for the flexibility. If adobe worked
well on *nix I would've just went with Slackware.

I also bought a Logitech G700 mouse.
Let me tell you this thing is amazing. If you are trying to decide
between a RAZER Naga and this... get the Logitech. I may buy another
for my Xbox.

I picked up a couple little things as
well...

Total System Price ~$2,350 ($2500 was my soft limit)

For Storage, I decided that I didn't
want any mechanical drives in my system but with video work I am
going to need lots of storage. I picked up a Synology Disk Station
412+ with three 2TB Western Digital Green drives. This thing is
amazing. Not only do you get your standard NAS options, you have
built in personal cloud (dropbox type thing) and a bunch of other
great utilities. It was worth the extra couple hundred. Synology's
Hybrid Raid (shr) is pretty nice too.

The Western Digital Greens are very
nice and work, however they do park often to save power. This means
they make a little noise every so often. It is not dangerous from
what I can tell but it is annoying. When I make changes to this
setup I will be replacing them with the Red Series.

The network here was in dire need of
upgrading. Most of the devices where running on wireless through a
Verizon router. My TV, Patriot Box, Xbox, 2 Phones and 2 Laptops. I
picked up a NetGear 8 port GigaBit Switch for my computer, NAS and
Uplinks. A 5port GigaBit for my TV/Patriot Box/Xbox and a NetGear
wireless extender for the upstairs along with some Cat5e. All worked
well except for the Wireless extender. I was under the impression
that it would route wireless through the switch, it turns out that it
doesn't. I ended up using an older Belkin Wireless N router set in
Access Point mode for the upstairs.

The network upgrades made a huge
difference.

Total Network Price ~$1,350

Here is a little video of the network parts on my kitchen table.

Total Price for both ~$3,700 (about
$1300 under budget)

I also have around $100 in rebates to
fill out and also got about $50 worth of swagbucks.com points by
purchasing with newegg. Would've been closer to $100 but I used
mypoints.com for the network order.

The computer parts should arrive
tomorrow or the next day.

Future updates will include Monitors,
waiting for Black Friday deals to see what happens there, adding
another SSD for RAID, another mouse for the Xbox, and More/better storage for the NAS.